The End of The Beginning

I'm finally back. After I finished the jam, I had many plans. Spending some time perfecting Smuggler's Run, and other game jams that I was excited to enter. But then came the monster that all college students fear: finals. It was a rough couple of weeks, and after they were over, I knew that I desperately needed a vacation. Now that I'm back, I figured that this would be a good time to dissect this project, and then to look ahead into my future plans. 

First, I should probably let you know a little background info about me. I'm not exactly new to game development, as I've been playing around in various engines for almost as long as I can remember, but I never really had the courage to fully invest myself into a project. A number of factors played into that changing. First was me finding this site. The community has been nothing but welcoming to  me, and ever since joining it I've felt at home. Second was me finding Godot. Godot is quite a unique game engine, and I pretty much fell in love with its scene based approach at first sight.  Finally, I came across the 8-bits-to-infinity's two button jam, something that excited me to no end. So, when all of those factors lined up, I decided to take the plunge.

When I started on Smuggler's Run, there was so much that I didn't know how to do. Most of what I learned, I learned through trial and error in development.It embarrasses me to say this, but looking at the original source code is like looking at the handwork of a terrible plumber. Yeah, the sink works, but if you look at the pipes under it, you will see a confusing mess of pipes, with some disconnected from the rest, some leading nowhere, and so on.For example, during the course of the jam, I couldn't figure how to change the backdrop in Godot, and as a last resort I decided to place a cube under the main scene, and alter its material to be pure black with no reflectivity (amusingly enough , I found the solution to this a day after I submitted the game.) Honestly, I'm shocked that the game worked as well as it did. 

That's not to say that I'm ashamed of it. After all, even if they were patchwork solutions, I was still able to make a fully functional (albeit very simple) game that stayed true to most of my core ideas. From the beginning, my intentions were to create a simple, arcade-like game that felt like a mix of galaga and mario cart. I wanted it to be a game about avoiding your enemies (as opposed to trying to destroy them)) and finding power-ups along the way to help you out. 

Unfortunately, those patchwork solutions ended up creating several limitations, which prevented me from implementing several of the features that I had in mind. For instance, thanks to the backdrop issue, I was unable to create a star-field, which would have added to the game's immersion by a large margin.

Over the past few weeks, I've managed to rework the game's framework from the ground up, and it is steadily approaching what I envisioned. Thanks to the community's feedback and suggestions, I've also been able to come up with several new ideas on how I can further improve the game.